Information Processing Biases in Impairment Decisions: Effect of Reversibility of Impairment Losses and Disclosure Transparency

ABSTRACT We investigate the effect of regulatory requirements on impairment decisions and managers' search for and evaluation of impairment information. We manipulate reversibility of impairment losses (“can be reversed” versus “cannot be reversed”) and transparency in disclosures of impairment assumptions (more transparent versus less transparent) in a 2 × 2 experiment. We find that managers are more willing to impair when impairment losses can be reversed than when they cannot be reversed, but this effect does not vary with disclosure transparency. We also find that managers display information search bias in all four experimental conditions, however, regulatory requirements do not result in differences in the level of information search bias across the conditions. In contrast, regulatory requirements affect the differences in the level of information evaluation bias across conditions. We find that when impairment losses cannot be reversed, information evaluation bias is higher when disclosures are more transparent than less transparent. JEL Classification: M40; M41.